Compound vs. Isolation Movements

Lift Clique 019: May 15, 2025

At the gym today an older gentleman asked what I was doing. Straight arm lat pulldowns, for the record, but I don’t think he was looking for the name. He said he’d never seen them done before and wondered if they could help him lose some fat “around here”—he gripped the outside of his pec.

Let me just say that the only way to lose fat is to be in a calorie deficit. You can’t target specific areas of your body for fat loss, and anyone who tells you any different is lying or mistaken. However, you can target specific areas for muscle gain through resistance training. Building muscle in a particular area can make you appear leaner there, even if your body fat hasn't changed, because increasing muscle decreases body fat percentage (assuming you do not gain fat as well). But regardless, a straight arm lat pulldown is a lat exercise, not a pec exercise.

I told him that no, that exercise probably wouldn’t help him achieve his goal, but if he wanted to target his pecs he could focus on pec flyes or cable crossovers. When I went on to further explain that the straight arm pulldowns I’d been doing are a great lat isolation exercise, his eyes kind of glazed over. Which is fair—it’s not what he was interested in. So I thought, Matthew, save it for Lift Clique.

In weight training, we can talk about two main categories of exercises: compound and isolation.

Compound moves (like squats, rows, and presses) involve multiple muscle groups at once—they’re the heavy hitters of any program. Isolation exercises (like leg extensions, bicep curls, or cable flyes) target just one muscle group, helping you fine-tune specific areas.

An easy way to tell the difference is to notice how many joints are being engaged in a movement—in a bench press, for example, you’re pivoting at both the shoulder and the elbow. In a tricep extension, you should be pivoting at only the elbow. Although I’ve watched many an ego lifter recruit their shoulders on those, and it makes me wince every time because they’re begging for an injury, those sweet babies.

A good routine should incorporate both compound and isolation movements. While it’s not a hard and fast rule, I prefer to start with compound exercises, which tend to be heavier loads since you’re using more muscles, and finish with isolation exercises, which are lighter and more specific.

So what’s the takeaway? There’s no shortcut and no magical move that’ll burn fat from one specific spot. But building a strong, well-balanced body comes from making compound movements your foundation, and using isolation exercises as the polish.

As an example, let’s look at the push day on my current program.